Richard Stein always said that children came from good. Before you are born, you are with God, which is Happiness. So during the early years of life, children are filled with good spirit and are happy and comfortable. The older you get, the further away from God you are, and you become bitter. That’s why so many old people are crabby. They’ve lost their memory of the good spirit.
“You know why I think the walm is here?” Christian puffs and gurgles.
I shrug, watching the blue woman smile at me.
“I think that the walm people are prisoners from other worlds, that have been sent here because all their prisons are full. All the governments in the rest of the universe decided to make one planet the BIG prison planet, so they chose Earth. It makes sense in a way.”
“I guess it makes sense,” I tell him, but I don’t like it when other people think their ideas are clever. I believe that my own ideas are clever, so I don’t like me either.
The frogs hopping indoors agree that we are on a prison planet. They themselves are frog criminals that were convicted of doing frog crimes. But the frogs are trying to escape imprisonment. They’re getting out of Rippington, out of Earth.
Richard Stein said that frogs were invented for a special purpose. They are the containers for dreams and fantasies and ideas. He said that there is no such thing as creativity/originality and that everything that can possibly be thought up has already been thought up; before time began, every different story existed in every different way. And every idea is stored in a huge vault near the center of the universe. So every time you create a song or draw a picture or write a poem, you’re not the true inventor of it, you’re just stealing it from the vault and calling it your own.
Frogs are the beings that disperse ideas to people. In some worlds, rocks have this job. In others, caterpillars do it. Sometimes even a strap-on dildo has the responsibility. But in this world, frogs are the dispersers. So there’s no such thing as originality. Sometimes an idea will seem original to a world, because that world has not experienced that idea yet, so it’s called new. But it’s not. Of course, the word originality contains the word origin, and origin means something that has already been done… my diction must be getting confusing. What I should say is that nothing will be fresh ever again. All creativity is just musty and stale.
But frogs must disperse fantasy because fantasizing is extremely important to the soul. It’s a mental block from reality, which is needed at times, like my go-away place. It is my stress-reliever. Without fantasy, reality would be hard to stomach.
The frogs see the storm moving in from the distance. It’s approaching very slowly, which means it will be leaving very slowly. The frogs are trying to flee, hopefully off the planet. Of course, if they get off the planet there will be no more imagination left in anyone’s brains. So hopefully they don’t get away.
Besides the storm, the frogs are fleeing imprisonment for having committed frog crimes. Frogs break the law when they don’t hand out fantasies. But it’s not their fault. The frogs stopped handing them out to the humans of the world, because nobody cared to have them. Soulless people have no need to meddle with imagination. So the frogs gave up on all of our world, except for Rippington. Some people still have souls here. That is why the town is overrun with frogs.
I finish my brandy and go to shut the door, kicking all the frogs outside. I’m not at all gentle with them and smear them against the concrete. I wonder if frogs are judgmental when they give out ideas. I wonder if my dreams are going to suffer tonight for hurting them. I wonder if I would be a very imaginative person if I became very nice to frogs.
I shut the door and turn to the blue woman. She’s still ogling me. A curious look. I hope I can feed her before I go to sleep.
Scene 14
Listen Day
Bladder: puffed to full, teeming with truncheons and pressure pain, the creature’s weight motivating it tighter tighter…
I awake early today, underneath the blue-skinned woman, whose sweating-smooth face is pressed into my flabby chest. Soothing skin against my body, eyelashes fluttering on my nipples and tickling…
I do not want to wake her, so pacific, but my bladder can’t hold in the pain for much longer. Her hair combines with the fire sheets, motions to billow-waves, a sea of flames crashing against my coast-like ribs… I’m still not moving. Still contemplating how I can get out from under her without waking her…
I’m still not moving.
God’s Eyes:
I go to Christian. He’s pacing in a dust suit, chalk white against black. His pacing goes back and forth from the thin of the warehouse to the metal-work sculpture section. Faster-faster… Then he slips into the teleporting portal and transfers himself to Satan Burger.
My vision follows:
There’s a sign on the Satan Burger window that tells me, “Satan Burger Closed For The Holiday. Reopens Tomorrow at 8:00 a.m.”
All the demons are resting. When no work needs to be done, the demons go back to standing still, acting like normal furniture. They let the warm sun dry their skins, and let the dust collect on their backs. Dust-bathing is very smoothing to furniture.
Satan is also dust-bathing. Cherry-red face pressed asleep against the table. Dreaming dreams of stories older than Earth I imagine, when he was God’s favorite invention, God’s first born son, born several minutes before his twin brother. His dreams make him cry, like my dreams used to make me cry. When I dreamt of the past — the time before my parents turned their back on me, just as Satan’s father did him — crying was frequent. It’s hard to stop remembering.
I don’t cry these days when I think back to my childhood, to the happy times before my mind caught a disease. I guess I just don’t care enough to cry. I lost the part of my soul that found caring necessary. Even when I’m sad, I cannot show the tears. I can only show a silent expression.
“Where is everyone?” Christian wakes Satan to ask. “Why is Satan Burger closed?”
Satan awakes. He shakes the bad dreams from his skull and flops them onto the demon table like jelly. “It’s Listen Day, nobody works on Listen Day. My twin brother is having a get-together to celebrate, and he invited your friends. Hopefully, he’ll be able to make Gin’s body parts dead again.”
“Why didn’t they ask me to go?” Christian complains.
Satan places his head back on the cold of the table surface. He says, “Nan is still here. You can go with her.” And then he closes his eyes so that dust can pile onto the lids.
Today is Listen Day, a holiday that the gods and everyone from the god worlds celebrate. Even Satan, who doesn’t believe in celebrating any holiday, celebrates Listen Day.
Everything was invented by someone or something, even time, space, love, sight, physicals, mentals, sound — and whatever you can think of. Most of these were all created by the Creators, which came from outside the universe’s understanding. They’re the gods of the gods, you could say, and they made time and space and the universe and the gods. Almost everything. Nobody knows who made them.
Sound wasn’t invented until recently, though; about a few billion years ago. It was invented by a god named STNT (pronounced Stint). He chose to stop existing so he doesn’t exist anymore. Some say he’s in hiding, others say he went to join the Creators. But according to history, he just stopped existing completely. He wanted to be nothing, and now he is.